Torrellan

Tac, just a heads up... DAOC character skill respecs can be obtained for free and do actually exist in the game. As a character rises in levels, you get a free skill respec at level 20 and again at level 40. To use the respec simply go to your trainer and type "/respec skillname". If you want to do some rearranging, it would be wise to respec your highest skill so you have the most points to work with. In addition to this, as you mentioned, there are now respec gems that can be obtained for certain monsters. Right now I know Dragons contain them and there may or may not be other uber creatures with respec stones. Basically, your two free level respecs should get you by until you can raise your level high enough to use respec stones. DAOC really is a sweet game and within the next month or two housing will be released. A few months after this another whole new expansion is scheduled for release. Torrellan

quote:Originally posted by Remo: Raid 5 just got a whole lot cheaper!!! Check out the new HighPoint RocketRAID 1540 SATA Controller... Retails for $90 and supports Raid 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JABOD. Yes, it's serial ATA, but comes with IDE adapters...Just a word of caution... I just looked at the specs on this controller and it doesn't seem very impressive. The card only has support for 4 channels (1 hard drive on each channel). Here is the important part however, two of those four channels are external. What that means is that in order to have a RAID 5 array, you would have to have two drives mounted internally and 1 external of your case. Or 2 external hard drives with one internal. This sounds pretty flaky to me. Also it doesn't exactly say that it is running all RAID handling through it's own processing chip. This leads me to think that it is probably stealing some percentage of processing time from the CPU. If you are on a budget, it may be a card worth looking at for a RAID 0 fix but if you really want performance and a robust RAID controller, I would still have to choose 3Ware. Torrellan

As the SC pointed out, there are several types of RAID configurations. RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 3 and RAID 5 are the most common. If you are planning to use a RAID Array in a gaming rig, DO NOT use a software based RAID manager. This uses precious CPU time that could otherwise be spent handling the game software. I personally use a 4 disk IDE RAID 5 Array on my AMD XP 2700+ rig and it works very well. RAID 5 however is not really built for performance but rather more for redundancy. I have high enough system specifications that the small hit I take in drive write operations is really not noticeable. I am using a hardware RAID controller by 3Ware. Specifically the Escalade 7500-8 model with 4 80GB Western Digital 7200 RPM 8MB cache hard drives. Since I run my system 24/7 due to SETI@Home processing, I opted for the protection RAID 5 offers. My system can sustain 1 failed hard drive and still remain fully operational. If I have a drive fail on me, I will take a small hit in performance (nothing to drastic) until I replace the bad drive and rebuild the array. My serious recommendation for a gaming platform if you do not need the redundancy offered by RAID 5 is to go RAID 0. RAID 0 is also known as striping. It works essentially the same way as RAID 5 in that it writes the data across all the disks in the array. Unlike RAID 5 however, if one drive were to fail your entire array crashes and you lose your data. RAID 0 will give you about the best drive performance you can get for read operations since it can pull data from all of the hard drives on the array at once. Typically when you are running games, this is usually what is occuring. Write operations are much faster than RAID 5 because unlike RAID 5, it does not have to worry about writing the ECC (recovery) information to the Array. RAID 1 is called "Mirror" because you essentially have 1 drive acting as a complete mirror (invisible) to your active hard drive. In the event of a failure to your main hard drive, the RAID 1 mirror automatically kicks in without interruption. This offers you no performance advantage what-so-ever (only redundancy) and is not something the average performance hungry gamer would want. When deciding to build an array the second biggest decision (after choosing your hardware RAID controller) you need to make is finding the right hard drives to operate in your array. Do you go for IDE or SCSI? IDE is generally cheaper and with the new performance standards on these drives the average gamer really won't need to look at SCSI. SCSI offers the absolute best performance but the price is extremely high per drive. Whichever technology you choose, make sure you get a drive that can operate at fast RPM speeds and has as much on board drive cache as you can get. These will give you a BIG boost to performance. You will also need to look at drive throughput. The typical IDE drive will function at ATA-100 or ATA-133 transfers. The 133 of course has faster throughput but this should not be your single deciding factor when purchasing a drive. You would be better off with an ATA-100 if you can get a drive with high RPM speed AND high drive cache for example. Lastly, make sure your rig has a sufficient power supply to handle your big boy RAID array. My current system runs a 430 watt power supply. If you are still running a system at 300 watts or lower, it would be a good idea to invest in a higher end power supply before you embark on your RAID adventure. This should about cover the basics. Happy hunting! Torrellan

Hello SC. Was wondering if there is any word yet as to the problem stated by b1bob and Epsilon5 regarding shuttles not returning to base after deploying their load on a planet/moon? I've encountered this very same issue with both RC12 and RC15. The steps I take are very straight forward. I observe the designated planet/moon (tried Earth, Earth's Moon, Saturn, as well as Alpha Majoris and it's moon), next I chose the desired shuttle craft and create a deploy drone waypoint for it on the surface. I have a flight engineer aboard the shuttle usually when I launch it. The shuttle correctly proceeds to the planet, lands, deploys the drone, I receive a message about 5 second dust-off, the shuttle proceeds to lift off from the surface and tries to RTB. Unfortunately the shuttle never actually makes it out of the atmosphere. It just bobs around 36k to 40k feet with its return to base mission forever displayed. I have taken steps to observe the shuttle's statistics and it's hull integrety is always at 100%. Now if I attempt to take my CC into the planetoids atmosphere then tell my shuttle to RTB, it will realize that I am in the same area as it and sure enough it will start flying in the direction of my CC. The darn thing just won't leave orbit though if my CC is in space. Under v1.07 the shuttle will leave the planet without issue. This problem has only been detected under the 1.08x series of RC patches. A few posts ago you stated that you had an idea as to what might be causing this but you never did report back any findings you may have discovered. I have already checked the known issues text and there is nothing relating to this issue contained therein. I was hoping you might be able to share with us any updated information you may have discovered. Thanks! Torrellan